Harry Clarke and Girls & Boys, performed respectively by Billy Crudup and Carey Mulligan, were solo plays produced at the Minetta Lane Theatre by Audible, the spoken word and audio media enterprise, which then recorded these attractions as audiobooks.
The latest show in this series of monologues is Proof of Love, which opened on Tuesday at the Minetta Lane. It is bankrolled through Audible’s new Emerging Playwrights Commission program.
A playwright who has been emerging for the last ten years or so, Chisa Hutchinson often writes dramas regarding people of color. A story about a well-bred black woman who discovers her husband is romantically involved with someone less privileged, Proof of Love touches upon classism in contemporary African-American life.
The setting depicts a spacious private room in a New Jersey hospital. Off to one side there is a bed hidden by curtains from which is heard the wheeze of a ventilator. It is here where Brenda Pressley portrays Constance, an elegant lady in later middle age, whose husband of 32 happy years, Maurice, lies in a coma.
Constance coolly details that Maurice was injured in a car crash on his way to visit a longtime girlfriend. Constance suspected nothing about this affair until she unlocked her helpless husband’s phone and started reading text messages. Constance then looked up the woman on Facebook.
This younger other woman, named Lashonda, is a municipal worker and an unmarried mother of three. Constance speculates that Lashonda reminds Maurice, a successful, self-made businessman, of the simpler existence he left back in the projects long ago.
“You’ve been so thoroughly immersed in my world of Blakes and Fortens it never really occurred to me that you might actually miss the Shakiras and Terrells,” remarks Constance, her patrician nose wrinkling with distaste.
Apparently Lashonda gave Maurice one of those her-or-me ultimatums. Maurice was speeding to her place with an answer when he suffered the accident that’s put him on life support.
These revelations cause Constance to reflect upon the true nature of her husband, to recall their courtship and marriage, to reevaluate the bourgeois life they have shared and, above all, to wonder what he was going to tell Lashonda.
Already contrived, especially within the expository limitations of a 75-minute monologue rendered in real time, the soapy story turns preposterous as Constance, assuming the guise of Maurice à la Cyrano, starts rapidly thumbing out text message exchanges with her unsuspecting rival.
What keeps Proof of Love from drifting into ridiculousness is the double anchor of the character that the playwright creates as augmented by Brenda Pressley’s tautly-controlled performance. Smartly dressed by Jen Caprio in gray and peach, Pressley tidily portrays Constance as a thoughtful soul whose rueful awareness of how others judge her elite values mitigates a snobbish attitude.
Jade King Carroll, the director, wisely maintains Pressley’s performance on an even keel. A tricky factor within the monologue involves the times when the silky Constance assumes Lashonda’s coarser tones to read aloud her messages. Carroll prevents Pressley from sounding too satirically ghetto and perhaps losing viewer empathy in the process.
Or should that be listener’s empathy? It will be interesting to hear how Proof of Love registers once it is released as an audiobook.
